“His humor … was always, always, very clever – never malicious,” Gallas said. “The things that he tweeted, from one perspective, are not malicious. … From another perspective, they’re not complimentary.”

In one @natsecwonk tweet saved by The Daily Beast before the Twitter account was shut down, Joseph managed to insult four public figures within the social media site’s 140-character limit:

Joseph apologized for his tweets in a statement emailed to Politico.com Tuesday night.

Joseph’s interest in national security goes back at least to his junior year of high school. In August 1988, he wrote a guest column for the Muskegon Chronicle about the lessening of Cold War tensions.

“How should the United States respond to this break in global tensions? That is the central question facing U.S. policymakers today,” Joseph wrote. “Now is the time for the U.S. to reassess its commitments around the globe.”

Some Muskegon Catholic Central classmates still remember Joseph.

“He was a smart kid, quiet,” said Muskegon’s Bruce Duff, who was a few years ahead of Joseph in school.

Kalamazoo’s Brian Mullally was a year behind Joseph in school, and also followed him to Georgetown University near Washington, D.C., where the two both received bachelor’s degrees from the university’s school of foreign service.

“Jofi was very driven, extremely intelligent, hard-working person,” Mullally recalled. “He was a very well-grounded person.”

Jofi went on to become a Truman Scholar at Princeton University. The graduate worked for U.S. senators and in the State Department before his job in the White House, according to media reports.

Gallas said that he, Joseph and Mullally all met at a Washington, D.C.-area pub in the mid-1990s. It was the last time, Gallas said, that he saw Joseph. The two fell out of touch for more than a decade, but Gallas quickly remembered Joseph when the former student’s job loss made headlines this week.

“I thought to myself, ‘Well, Jofi, I feel very bad for you’ … because he’s probably a bright spot in our government today,” Gallas said. “I hope his career continues, because he’s a brilliant young man, and brilliant in government and politics.”